It’s the issue that just never seems to die.
On April 30 another chapter in the ongoing School Resource Office debate will be penned.
On that date Pembina Hills school division officials will host a town-hall meeting to drum up support for an SRO at Westlock-area schools. If we’re speaking Greek, an SRO, at its core, is the placement of a police officer in schools.
For more than a decade, the notion of an SRO has been debated in Westlock — and more specifically who will pay for the position.
Different municipalities at different times have balked at the notion of spending local tax dollars on what should be the responsibility of the school division. And for the most part they’re right.
That said, if there was hard evidence that could justify an SRO … maybe, just maybe the politicians would climb on board.
But when you spend public money, you need a good reason as to why you’re spending it, which means quantifiable evidence.
The Town of Westlock is right in its refusal to support the SRO. The numbers don’t add up, because there aren’t any.
There’s no longitudinal dataset to show SROs work and a lot of data to show they create other ancillary issues.
It also needs to be said that any research into the role an SRO is a social science. Nothing about this issue exists in a vacuum.
What’s to say that Westlock-area kids don’t feel good about approaching police officers already?
The truth is we don’t know.
This isn’t the first time lack of evidence for public spending has come up recently.
When the Alberta Health Services decided to do away with a centralized control structure, it didn’t do so because hospital stays are up, or patient outcomes were getting worse.
No, the report justifying the decision came with three pages of anecdote. Not one bit of hard data, not one spot of evidence based correlation and causality. Just a lot of ‘this person says this’ and ‘that person thinks that.’
Good government can’t be based on speculation and hearsay. Taxpayers deserve better.
